Another of the City’s most established law firms in the Middle East has shut shop in Qatar in a sign that the market for international legal practice in the Gulf is contracting.

Herbert Smith Freehills, the Anglo-Australian firm, announced yesterday that it was pulling the plug on its outpost in Doha only four years after planting a flag in the country.

The move came a day after Clifford Chance, one of the Square Mile’s elite band of five "magic circle” law firms, revealed that it was closing its six-year-old Doha office.

However, the Herbert Smith Freehills move was more dramatic as it comes two years after shutting its office in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE. In the mid-2000s, before merging with Freehills, the English firm rapidly expanded in the Gulf region from its base in Dubai.

In a statement HSF said that it was confident that it would be able to service regional clients from its two remaining offices in the region in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. “The Middle East region is a key strategic market for the firm,” said a spokeswoman, adding that it would “continue to invest” in the region.

English and US international law firms adopted a gold rush approach to the Gulf region in the mid-2000s, with as many as 50 using Dubai as a launch pad to Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain.

The financial crisis in 2008 put the brakes on the market. Within the past few years several western firms – including Simmons & Simmons, Latham & Watkins and Baker Botts – have closed regional offices.

Ministers have surrendered to the nimbys, an expert lawyer said yesterday as the government launched much-vaunted proposals to resolve the UK’s housing crisis.

Carl Dyer, a partner and head of the planning team at the national law firm Irwin Mitchell, described government proposals to fix the country’s “broken” housing market as “a profound disappointment”.

“There was talk of this being a game-changer,” said the lawyer. “It isn't.”

Dyer criticised the minister for having “bought the argument that the problem is not the planning system but developers refusing to implement planning permissions. The same was said of supermarkets for years, and then the Competition Commission investigated the claims and found they were nonsense.”

Dyer acknowledged that there were delays implementing permissions as local councils imposed “dozens of conditions”.

“It can take months or years to meet them all,” said Dyer, claiming that “very few permissions actually lapse, so shortening the life of permissions will have almost no long-term impact”.

Critics of the white paper predicted that there would be two short-term ramifications. “Permissions will have to be implemented during this parliament rather than the next one,” said Dyer. “That is doubtless the intention – to help the government towards its already forlorn-looking target of one million homes this parliament.

“They won’t get there. We’ve been building about 35,000 homes a quarter; we needed to be building 50,000 per quarter; and the required rate is heading towards 60,000 per quarter. Nothing in this white paper is going to change that.”

Others had a more diplomatic reaction to the government’s plans. Duncan Field, a partner at the transatlantic law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, described the proposals as providing “many sticks and a few carrots”.

He said that the “most eye-catching” elements of the white paper were proposals in favour of a “presumption in favour of sustainable development” in cases where “delivery by local authorities against housing requirements falls below specific percentages over the next few years”.

Field forecast that the promise of a more streamlined process for local plans and the introduction of a standardised approach to assessing housing need “should help local authorities rise to this challenge”.

Proposed government reforms of the legal aid payment scheme for junior advocates will put the criminal bar out of business in ten years, a senior solicitor-advocate predicted yesterday.

The Ministry of Justice announced at the beginning of the year plans to create a “modernised” graduated fee scheme, which would peg rates to the seriousness and complexity of individual cases.

Barrister organisations including the Bar Council and the Criminal Bar Association welcomed the move. But the proposal was lambasted by the solicitors’ body, the Law Society, which claimed that it would penalise solicitor-advocates and junior barristers.

Now James Parry, chairman of the society’s criminal law committee, has increased the temperature over the issue by claiming that if the government proceeds with the revised scheme the criminal bar will pack up within ten to 15 years.

Speaking to the blog Legal Hackette’s Brief, Parry described the ministry’s proposal as “grossly unfair to the junior bar and solicitor-advocates. It restores an increase to silks, but juniors will suffer.”

Parry predicted that criminal defence specialist law firms would “take the financial hit for their junior solicitors who get paid a wage, but junior barristers will take the hit themselves.”

After analysing the government’s revised scheme, Parry said that the rate offered to junior advocates was “not far off burger-flipping money”.

See Blue Bag diary below

Stock market punters would have done well to steer clear of legal profession shares last year as they generally underperformed, according to analysis published this week.

Accident claims management companies were the biggest losers, suffering after the government published in November proposals to reform whiplash compensation and increase the small claims limit.

The research from the website Legal Futures found that shares in outfits such as Fairpoint, Redde and the NAHL Group were all badly affected by the proposed personal injury reforms.

Also partially affected by those plans was the Anglo-Australian listed legal services business Slater & Gordon, with the study showing that the firm’s value continued to slide, dropping by 73 per cent last year to a share price of A$22.5.

Countrywide, the owner of a large firm of licensed conveyancers, also took a big hit last year as its share price fell by 56 per cent, arguably the result of fears for the residential property market after last summer’s vote for the UK to leave the EU.

The only significant winners in the legal profession stock market last year were Gateley, England’s only home-grown listed legal services company, and Burford, the third-party litigation funding business.

Deliveroo cycle riders in Brighton have issued an ultimatum to their bosses, ramping up the legal war of words over employment rights at “gig economy” businesses.

In a letter to the company yesterday, union official acting for the riders called for improved pay and conditions, alleging that riders working in the city were routinely paid less than the minimum wage.

Officials at the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain threatened that if the company did not reach an agreement with riders in the next fortnight it would trigger a range of local strikes and protests.

The union claims that Deliveroo bosses have hired too many riders in Brighton, meaning that many are “faced with a stark situation of spending several hours in the cold waiting for work, at times for as long as four hours”.

According to the union, the riders do not receive payment for waiting time and they are forced to finance all their own equipment and other costs. Officials are also calling on Deliveroo to boost its “drop rate” – the fee to the rider paid for each delivery – by £1 to £5 each.

At the end of last November, lawyers for the union applied to the Central Arbitration Committee, a government body, in an attempt to force Deliveroo to recognise the IWGB as the representative body for its cycle riders.

Deliveroo was launched in London in 2013 and now operates in 84 cities in 12 countries. It is estimated to have 20,000 riders on its books, who the company maintains are self-employed contractors.

The IWGB has had some success for gig economy workers, in one case winning employment rights for a bicycle courier employed by CitySprint in a landmark ruling at the beginning of this year. The union is backing other cases against a range of courier firms including Addison Lee, eCourier and Excel. Hearings are expected to start next month and continue throughout the summer.

Magic circle firms to rake in £100m on LSE Deutsche Boerse merger – The Lawyer

County court judgments against businesses tumble by 20% -- Law Gazette

Barristers blast regulator over ‘self-serving’ training reform plan – Legal Business

Putin signs law partially decriminalising domestic violence – Daily Telegraph

Chinese judge slams Trump as a 'public enemy of the rule of law' – Sky News